Assignment — Angelina

by Edward S. Aarons

  A normal life? Durell wondered. He drew a deep breath. Here was the future, unless statesmen proved more gifted, and humanity veered from the insanity of atomic war. Here was a future that could exist only underground.

  The explosion he had heard was not repeated.

  He paused, trying to put himself in the place of those he hunted. What were they after? Slago and Fleming wanted money. He did not know about Jessie Corbin. Her motives were more subtle and devious. Durell looked at an electric clock on the wall of the communications room. Seventeen minutes left.

  Suddenly he turned and began to run, searching for the obvious objective. Angelina hurried silently after him, Corbin's Luger gripped in her hand. When Durell came to another tunnel, he saw he was in a new restricted area devoted to cabinet officers. The names of each department of the government was painted in signs over the doorways — Commerce, Agriculture, State, Justice, Defense, Treasury.

  He slammed open the last door.

  He stood in a maze of offices, all softly lighted, all empty and waiting. A familiar scent touched him, pumped along on the current of air filtering through the mountain labyrinth. It was the smell of powder, the odor of an explosion. He followed it, running lightly along the corridors, and then he suddenly came upon a vast, circular room, furnished with desks, tables, tellers' cages, a vault in the rear.

  It figured, Durell thought, that if they planned a complete national headquarters like this, somebody in the Treasury Department would have a hand in it, too. In the sort of national catastrophe that would require this place, there would be financial panic, a run on money, perhaps the destruction of the government mints and printing plants. There had to be a cache of currency here, hundreds of millions, planned for release and distribution among the surviving populace to restore monetary confidence. Jessie Corbin must have learned about it. She would have a lot to tell, that woman. Where she got the information, how she got it, who the traitor is. But that was how she got Slago and Fleming to do her dirty work for her, Durell thought. She promised them the biggest cache of currency in the country.

  * * *

  The door to the vault was partly open. The muffled blast he had heard a few moments ago had knocked the heavy door off its hinges. The door had not been as solid or secure as any surface bank vault. Down here, there had been no need for it. Light streamed from inside the vault. Durell put out a hand and stopped Angelina. He held his gun ready. He smelled the acrid remnants of the explosion, not quite dissipated yet by the steady suck and hiss of the air ducts.

  A low scraping sound came from inside the vault. Durell listened for the sound of Jessie Corbin's voice. He didn't hear it. She wasn't here; she wasn't interested in the money. She would be busy elsewhere. He was sure Slago or Fleming was in the vault. They had no hint of his presence. Durell touched Angelina and backed quietly out of the huge circular room. Her eyes shot a question at him, but he shook his head quickly for silence.

  In the corridor outside he paused, looked at his watch. Angelina whispered: "But they're in there. He's in there, Slago. Why don't you..."

  "They're not important. They'll be busy for another ten minutes, loading and packing the money. The girl is somewhere else, and she's the one I've got to stop." He looked at Angelina with uncertainty. "Do you think you could hold everything here?"

  "Alone?"

  "I don't have much time. They've split up, and the girl is more important than those two in there." He didn't like to leave her along again. "Never mind," he said. "Stick close to me."

  "No, I'll stay," she said. "They won't get out."

  He looked at the Luger in her hand. He looked at the steady lift of her eyes. He couldn't spare any more time thinking about it.

  "All right," he decided. "When you hear them come out of the vault, close this door. Fire a couple of shots into it, to hold them inside. If they start for you anyway, do whatever is necessary to keep them here. Do you understand?"

  She nodded, pushed back her tangled black hair, and even managed a taut smile. "Go ahead, Sam, don't worry about me. I'm all right"

  He moved away from her down the empty corridor. At the first turn, he looked back. She was holding the gun in both hands, pointed at the big door to the circular room. She wasn't looking at him at all...

  Later, when he dreamed about the next few minutes' search, it followed the familiar pattern of racing and hunting through a morbid, deserted world, as if he were the last man left alive. Everywhere he saw the silently operating machines, working on automation, a mechanical industry and a calm patience that was unhuman and unnatural. There were long steel stairways spiraling deeper into new abysses, more corridors, barracks, mess rooms, and offices. He ignored everything but the military units. Wherever he saw a restricted sign, he entered, searched, and went on.

  Finally he came to where an army major lay slumped over a desk. The door stood open beyond the unconscious man. To the left, an atomic warning sign was blazoned over a long, downward ramp where Durell guessed the power plant was located. He ignored that and pushed past the unconscious major. This was the heart of it all, the reason for the existence of all this elaborate paraphernalia. Durell glanced at the long tables, the computing machines, the maps and charts and pinpointed SAC airbases, Nike sites, and more symbols that he guessed were launching bases for intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was all here, faithfully reproduced, in a sweeping panorama of silent efficiency that was designed to reduce confusion and permit those in charge of national security to carry on with a minimum of delay.

  And here was Jessie Corbin, too.

  * * *

  She stood with her back to him, under a bank of pale yellow lamps, and she took a flat tray of charts out of a cabinet before her. She was using a miniature camera, snapping shot after shot of the entire defense pattern. Her blonde head was bent forward over her task. She wore dark slacks and a thin sweater and she had a large leather shoulder bag slung against her hip. She gave no sign of being aware of his entrance behind her. She took one more flash picture, rolled the tray of charts back, and set her camera for another, then paused to glance at her watch.

  Durell said: "I think you've taken quite enough."

  His voice held a harsh, echoing quality in the huge room. Jessie Corbin didn't move at once. She stood still, and Durell lifted his gun and watched her holding the camera in both hands. Then she put it down carefully on the map tray. Turning, she smoothed her palms on the thighs of her slacks.

  "So you've found us," she said quietly.

  "Did you think I wouldn't?"

  "We should have left the girl with you. That was my mistake," she said. "It would have satisfied you long enough to put you far behind us."

  "No."

  "Have you found her?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I have nothing to bargain with, have I?"

  "There was never any chance to bargain," Durell said. "Move away from the charts, please. Put your camera on the table there."

  She did as she was told. He could read very little in her face. Her pale violet eyes looked up at him once, shockingly hard and cold, and that was all.

  "Now come with me. We don't have much time,"

  "Nine minutes."

  "Who were you going to sell your films to?" he asked.

  "Anybody," she said. "I don't care who the buyers may be. The obvious customers, of course, are the people behind the Iron Curtain. But I've had offers from other sources that would surprise you. From people the State Department regards as friendly. You would be amazed at how many so-called neutrals, and even allies, would like to know what America's defense plans actually are."

  "And you'd sell to the highest bidder?"

  Her mouth twisted. "Don't moralize to me, Durell. I don't know who you are, but I can guess. I made the mistake of thinking you were just a small-time crook from the bayous, out for an easy dollar. I didn't quite classify you with Slago and Fleming, but close enough to have made my major error. Can we bargain at all?"

 
"No."

  She picked up the camera again, weighing it in her hands. She was surprisingly calm, and this worried Durell, because he had expected violence from her in last-minute defeat. She said: "There's a lot of money represented in these films, but it isn't for the money that I did all this. I wasn't ever treated right, you know. I never had a decent chance. I had to sell myself for anything I ever got, and even then I was cheated and thrown aside afterward. I made up my mind long ago that I would get even for the kind of rotten life I had over here. I guess you know all about what I've been doing in Europe."

  "Some of it, Durell admitted. "You've had a lifelong jag of self-pity, haven't you?"

  I never got a break, I tell you!" she said angrily. "With these films, it doesn't matter what happens to me afterward. Maybe you think everything here can be changed around in time. But it's too complicated, and you know it. It would take months, even a year or more, to relocate all the bases and redesign the defense plans. With these films in the hands of my buyers, this country wouldn't get the chance to plan a new setup."

  "Your buyers aren't going to get them," Durell said.

  "I think they will. You can't stop me."

  "Ill take the camera now," Durell said. "Put it down on the table and walk over to the wall."

  She didn't move. She seemed to be waiting for something.

  * * *

  Whatever she was waiting for didn't happen. Not just then. Durell looked beyond her and saw the charts and diagrams and organizational tables, the huge plot map of the United States and most of the Northern Hemisphere, with buttons indicating bases and long radii reaching out to other parts of the globe, pointing the way toward retaliation. He saw Jessie Corbin's angry face, the intelligent violet eyes, the harsh red mouth.

  "Where did you learn about this place?" he asked.

  "From a man."

  "From a traitor. In Washington?"

  "You won't learn his name from me."

  "I think we will, Mrs. Corbin. We'll learn a lot from you. You're going to tell us who gave you the information that brought you to this place and why he gave it to you and where we can pick him up. You'll tell us all that and everything else, before the sun goes down."

  "You'll be dead by then," she said quietly.

  "And in a few minutes the garrison here is going to start waking up."

  "That's right."

  "How do you expect to get out?"

  "I know a way."

  "You don't really know anything," Durell said. "All you know is your futile grievance because of your own failures. You tell yourself you've been cheated by a system that never gave you a chance, but if you were honest you'd admit that the failure was in you, and nowhere else. Yet you're willing to smash everything for a moment's revenge. You're ready to see millions die and more millions suffer in agony. I don't understand you. I don't know how you could do what you've tried to do. I don't feel sorry for you. I don't feel any pity. What's going to happen to you is only what you've asked for yourself."

  "We'll see," she said.

  "We'll find your real accomplices. I know Slago and Fleming aren't important. Neither is Erich, really. But the man who gave you those blueprints is, and you re going to tell us where to look for him."

  He had been waiting and listening through the sound of his voice for another sound, of any kind, from Angelina. But he hadn't heard anything. And now he knew that too much time had gone by, and there should have been something, perhaps the crash of Angelina's Luger, because Slago and Fleming knew the time limit and would be starting out by now. But he hadn't heard a thing.

  And then, as Jessie smiled, he heard the footstep behind him.

  Chapter Twenty

  Durell did not know where it had gone wrong, and there was no time to think or wonder about it.

  "Drop it, Durell."

  Durell lowered his gun, but he did not let go of it. The voice had been harsh and angry, and he guessed it was Fleming. Not Slago. He did not hear Slago's footsteps. He wondered desperately what had gone wrong with Angelina, and then Jessie said in a flat voice: "Durell is with the FBI or something like that, Mark. Kill him, please."

  "You've seen him before," Fleming said. "How do you know so much about him, Jessie?"

  "Don't waste time talking," the woman snapped. We've got only a few minutes to get out of here." She picked up the camera. "Hurry, Mark."

  Fleming said: "Did you get everything you wanted, baby?"

  "Yes. Now get this over with and let's go."

  "Slago didn't get what he wanted," Fleming said. "Neither did I."

  In the momentary silence, Durell turned a little. He could see Fleming now, in the doorway to the plotting room. He stood directly under one of the fluorescent light tubes that shone down on his yellow curly hair and made strange shadows on his round, boyish face. His mouth was ugly. His gun was pointed at a spot between Durell and Jessie Corbin, and he was looking at the woman with hatred.

  "What is it?" Jessie said. She held the camera to her breast. "What's the matter with you, Mark?"

  "It's the money," Fleming said. "Millions of it. It was all there, all right, just as you said. Only it's no good."

  "No good?"

  "It's all been printed on special plates, with new engravings. It's marked 'Emergency Currency.' Right now it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Look at it!"

  He tossed a packet of currency with his left hand. It landed on the table and went sliding and turning along the polished surface toward the woman standing behind it. Jessie Corbin's eyes followed the money as if hypnotized. Mark Fleming looked at it, too.

  Durell shot Fleming in the left knee, shot him again in the right arm.

  The sound of his gun raised smashing echoes in the underground room. Fleming went down as if his leg had been yanked out from under him, and the gun in his hand went clattering to the tiled floor. He began to scream before the echoes died away, staring wide-eyed at his shattered leg. Durell spun around toward Jessie Corbin at the table. She wasn't there. She was running for a door at the far end of the plotting chamber, carrying her precious camera. Durell raised his gun, then lowered it. He couldn't shoot her. She knew too much. She knew the name of the traitor in Washington.

  Fleming's screams followed him as he plunged into a back corridor behind the plotting room. Apparently Jessie Corbin knew exactly where she was going; she ad thoroughly memorized the blueprints to this maze. He glimpsed her as she darted through another doorway, and as Durell ran after her through the exit, a man on his hands and knees got in his way and Durell stumbled and fell over him and slammed hard against the wall. The man was an army sergeant, crawling stolidly toward a telephone on a desk in the corridor. The thought touched Durell that Corbin's gas was wearing off a few minutes earlier than expected. In a few more moments, all hell would break loose as the stunned garrison came back to life. There would be no time for questions or arguments with the aroused guards. They would shoot first at any stranger they saw.

  He raced on after Jessie Corbin. There was a long stairway ahead, at the end of the corridor, and instead of climbing them to an upper level nearer the surface, she darted downward. Durell sprinted, glimpsed her as she turned a corner in the far depths, and heard a low, moaning alarm siren groan into life. More of the garrison members were coming to. He hit the stairs hard, his left hand sliding on the bannister, spinning on the newel posts at each landing. He had no idea where the girl was heading. Possibly for an elevator she knew about down here. She still had the camera, and he yelled her name, ordering her to halt. She didn't bother to look back. She was more than fifty feet ahead of him, running down a long ramp at the foot of the stairway, when he fired a shot over her head. Her body flinched, but she didn't stop. There was a door ahead, with large red warnings printed above it, and she yanked it open and ducked through. Durell looked at the atomic insigne and plunged after her.

  He was in another huge, circular room, standing upon a gallery that ran high around the circumference of the pit belo
w. The walls were tiled in ceramic white. More warning signs were hung everywhere. A technician in a white smock was standing dazedly on the floor of the pit far below the railing where Durell halted and looked down. The man was scratching his head and looking around as if wondering what had hit him. Durell saw the bank of instruments down there, the lights flickering, saw the massive wall of the atomic reactor, the shielded pipes, the dials and the controls, the doors on the gallery opposite the door he had entered.

  He did not see Jessie Corbin.

  The technician shouted something from the floor below, and his voice reached Durell in garbled, querulous echoes. He didn't bother to reply. He looked to right and left, searching for the woman. Panic touched him, lest he lose her. There were other doors, some painted red, some yellow, all closed. She had vanished behind one of them, ducking off the gallery. He chose the one that read, Emergency Exit, spun on his heel, slapped the swinging panel open, and went through.

  * * *

  They were waiting for him here. It was a small room, painted yellow, with an archway beyond leading to another gallery that in turn opened onto a conventional power plant that drew the steam for its turbines from the atomic generator behind him. This was the source of the steady pulsing pressure of energy he had felt far up on the surface, before his descent.

  "Come on in, buddy boy."

  He saw Slago and Angelina. Jessie Corbin was punching the buttons of an emergency elevator set into a recess beside the archway. Her face looked pale and savage. Slago had Angelina's gun. He held her with one massive forearm locked around her waist.

  Angelina made a gasping sound. "Don't worry about me, Sam. Please."

  Jessie looked at Durell and said to Slago: "What are you waiting for? Take him! He got Mark..."

  "The elevator won't work," Durell said. "Drop the gun, Slago. The garrison is waking up. Mark can't help you, either. Nobody can help you now. You can't get out of here."